AT LOOSE ENDS AFTER MONTHS IN MY ROOM, doing nothing but watching AmazonNetflixHulu, I decide to cruise Craigslist for a job. Under “part-time gigs in and around Dodge City,” I come across a listing for a “junior writer of Fake News, paid $15.75 per published article.”

Seems reasonable, I think, though I have no point of comparison. After corresponding a little with someone named XGurl69, I’m told to “just write about whatever you think is happening here, since that’s the easiest way of making sure anything you publish is fake.”

Fair enough, I reason, setting out onto the Internet to see what I can find. The first story that catches my eye (which forms the basis for the article I’m writing now) has to do with a confluence of snakes that vanished into Dead Sir upon Pussygrab’s inauguration. According to eyewitness accounts, they swarmed in from numerous surrounding counties, desperate to partake in what some claim they saw as a chance at a New World Order. “A snake revolution,” as one blogger put it, in between posts demanding the complete eradication of paper money and public schools.

In any case, the snake-pit grew increasingly dense over the early months of the Pussygrab Regime, until their bodies absorbed all the nutrients Dead Sir could offer and began to degrade into oil, trapped deep beneath the shale ledge upon which the bog wobbles.

Several months later, the snake oil is declared ready for extraction. Naturally, hundreds of snake oil salesmen (in the literal sense of the term) swarm into town, in a mini-Gold Rush of epic proportions. They’re all holed up in the same Hotel I’m writing this from, busy trying to steal one another’s claims, tarnish one another’s reputations, and poison one another at the Bar (the dead bodies are dragged out with the empty bottles at the end of each shift).

Over the course of a week of frantic activity, they drain Dead Sir and pipe the snake oil out of the shale, bottling it for wholesale distribution. Costco, some sources report, has already put in a bid for a billion metric tons, as has AmazonWholeFoods.

But there’s a hitch: when the snake oil salesmen have finished their extraction and loaded their trucks, they’re stopped at the newly militarized Dodge City Border, where Pussygrab officials demand to know just where they think they’re headed with such precious cargo. When they answer, “Back to America,” they are executed on the spot.

The bodies of all 600 snake oil salesmen are tossed into the now-dry pit of Dead Sir, and the product is returned to Dodge City, where Pussygrab claims, on an impromptu Netflix Special later that same night, “no longer will our most cherished products be exported for the benefit of foreign markets. No, good people of Dodge City: I promise you, from now on, all Dodge City snake oil will remain right here, where it belongs.”

So now there’s a glut: a billion metric tons of snake oil is far more than any town can absorb, and besides, as noted economist Larry Finkelbaum puts it on a Netlfix 2 expose of the phenomenon, “the cardinal rule of the snake oil trade is that it must always be sold far from where it’s extracted. Otherwise, all public credulity in its potential use as an aphrodisiac or miracle cure or whatever it’s being marketed as tends toward zero. I mean, all of us here in Dodge City know it’s from a bunch of dirty snakes that drowned in a swamp, right? Who’s gonna believe that cures blindness?”

And, indeed, no one does. The snake oil sits undistributed in its crates until it starts to rot and the Pussygrab Regime has no choice but to begin marketing it as water. “Regular, secular water,” Paul Sweetie announces during Sunday Worship. “Nothing funny about it. Just good, honest water, folks.”

But, of course, it’s not. No one forgets that it’s snake oil except those who, according to another Netflix 2 expose, begin a campaign claiming that, “the Pussygrab Regime is poisoning our drinking water and turning our children into snake-people. Resist! Resist! Don’t drink the water!! Better to die of thirst than live as a snake-boy!!”

*****

With that, I finish writing my first piece of fake news and send it off for review, fingers crossed, since I’m not ashamed to admit that I could really use the money. In the meantime, I fire up Amazon to see what’s new with the so-called “First Dodge City Genocide,” which I’m sure has been drawing nearer by the day, if it isn’t already in progress.